First: Tim Keller has 6+ free MP3’s on the Church and the city here.
Second: I wrote a summary of Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Early Christianity and implications for the contemporary church that can be found here).
Acts 11:19-30
Acts 11:19-30
I find that most people have heard of Antioch…but can’t quite remember where? So I have put together the following, totally unscientific, survey of where people have heard of Antioch.
"O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in
thy mercy." And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals…then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.”Seriously, that is an iconic scene. Last Christmas Eve I was visiting my brother at his church. A couple thousand people were passing through that church that night and he is the associate pastor. So I was a little taken aback when he tried to get my attention during the music from like 40 ft away. He mouthed these words, “Hly hnd gnd o ntch’ while pointing at the Christmas tree. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say, until I looked at the tree. He was pointing at this ornament.
The maker of this ornament was either hilariously oblivious or hilariously hilarious.
But tonight, we are going to resume our journey through the story of the earliest church with the account of the church in Antioch. It honestly, seems a little anti-climactic to jump back into Acts after that relationships series. But, we need to be careful not to distort the Scriptures by letting our questions totally dictate our study. It is appropriate to bring our questions to the text, which is why Dan and I try to topical talks about 25% of the time. We ned to let the scriptures speak about what they want to speak about in the proportion they want to speak about it. But, on the whole, the text should set the agenda. Fortunately, Luke starts out today’s passage with a little recap.
11:19 ‘those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews’ 20 But, there were some…who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, telling them the good news of Jesus.”
11:19 ‘those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews’ 20 But, there were some…who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, telling them the good news of Jesus.”
After a very good start, where the church grew like crazy and enjoyed a relatively good relationship with the surrounding community, the new Christians began to be hunted down and killed. They were getting stoned…and not in the fun way. In the moment this must have been really confusing, but in retrospect, God used it to chase them out of the safe confines of Jerusalem and start to bring the story and message of Jesus throughout the Roman empire.
Until now, Christianity remained, largely a Jewish movement. (11:19 ‘telling the message only to Jews.') We have seen isolated incidents of pagans becoming Christians. If you recall Kevin’s talk about the Ethiopian and my talk about Cornelius a Roman bad ass last quarter. But what was about to take place in Antioch was a total game changer. The fledgling Christian movement would never be the same again.[2] It is in Antioch, that the movement gets the name we still use today. And appropriately so, because it is in Antioch that Jesus’ command in chapter 1, that his name would be spread to the ends of the earth becomes a reality.
It all starts with two upstart, unnamed, self-motivated Christians from Cyprus.[3] These guys
decide to try something totally crazy. They decide to try to plant a church in one of the most pagan, cosmopolitan, diverse, and divided cities in the Roman Empire. I guarantee you that people laughed at them. But to everyone’s shock, it goes incredibly well. The church hadn’t seen growth like this since Peter preached that first message back in chapter 2. And things would never be the same again. And so the Church in Jerusalem sends Barnabas to see what is going on. Barnabas not only approves of the church, but stays on to help and recruits Paul…and the Church spreads like no other world view in human history over the next 300 years from this remarkable church.So, this passage begs us to ask one overwhelming questions…why? What was it about the church in Antioch that made it so effective? I am going to argue that there were three things that made the church in Antioch particularly effective. Three things that we can learn from this remarkable community. It was 1) Urban, 2) Misisonal, and 3) Multicultural.
1) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Urban
First, it was urban. One of the most obvious but least frequently observed features of the early church is that it was primarily an urban movement. Early Christianity thrived on the density, desperation, depravity and diversity of the great urban centers of the Roman empire. You can argue from this passage, that the movement didn’t really take off until it hit a major urban center. There is that scene in Braveheart where Wallace spreads oil over the enemy battle field. When a flaming arrow is shot at the nearby grass the blaze spread slowly until it hit the oil, and then it took off. This is the a good picture of how Acts and historical sources describe the growth of the church. It plugged along slowly until it hit the cities. Then it took off at a qualitatively different rate.
Antioch was the 3rd largest city in the Roman world[4]. You can think of it as the Chicago of the Roman world (behind LA and NY).[5] It was 10-20 times larger than Jerusalem. And, not only were there a lot of people, but they were packed in. Rodney Stark estimated the population density of Antioch at 195 persons per acre. Compare this to 100 for Manhattan, 122 for Calcutta and 183 for Mumbai (Bombay)…but Antioch had no buildings >4 stories high...and no toilets.
So why point this out. Isn’t essentially a historical curiosity. It is important to recognize because the urban nature of the early church was fundamental to its growth and effectiveness. The early church grew because it was a fundamentally urban movement. It grew because it came to love people and found them easiest to love in their densest, most diverse and most desperate state.
Tim Keller (to whom I owe most of my thought on this topic) says: “The more urban the environment, the bigger the city the more Christianity flourished. The more dense the population, the more pluralistic, the more crime the more poverty, the more social troubles, the more personal brokenness, the cityer the city the deeper the fruit in quality and quantity that the gospel bore.”
But somehow, contemporary evangelical Christianity has become one of the most anti-urban demographics of the American population. With the notable exceptions of the Black Church and the Catholic Church, modern American Christianity has gravitated to the suburbs. And, modern missiologists argue, this is sidelining us culturally. We are underrepresented in the city. And this is problematic in two ways. First, Christians should be wherever there are people and should be particularly attracted to the social ills that cities generate. But it is also a problem because culturally, Cities are upstream.[6] As the city goes, so goes the culture.
Keller again, “American Christians are the most anti-urban Christians in the world and as a
result American cities are the most underserved by Christians. (It would take) 10% of evangelical Christians in this country to move into cities to live proportionally…Jew(ish people) for example, gay people for example, Asian people, Black and Hispanic people all live disproportionately in cities, and as a result the have a lot more cultural power, and they deserve it, because there they are …until evangelicals are willing to live in the city they can stop bellyaching about what’s going wrong with the culture.”
Cities are not more important but they are more strategic. If we were going to be underrepresented somewhere, it should be anywhere but our nation and world’s urban centers. It is the one place early church was overrepresented. This may be a particularly tough message for some of you, because, many of you could have gone to Berkeley or UCLA but chose Davis because of precisely how urban it wasn’t. You may hate the city. But you are going to have to get use to urban life sooner or later, because after the final day, when God establishes his kingdom and remakes the world, he describes the new realm of his eternal reign a great city. Eternity is going to be urban. You don’t read in the scriptures about a great escatalogical suburb coming down from heaven.
So what about us now? We are aggies? We go to a school that has, no kidding, over 100 cows (including this one) on campus[7] and a road called dairy drive. Well, in two weeks, I am going to argue from Acts 17, that the only thing in the same strategic ballpark as the city is the University. That is why Amanda and I are spending a season here. And you should make the most of your few years of influence in one of our world’s great academic institutions. But what I want you to get from this observation is: ‘Don’t run from the city.’ In the next 1 to 4 years you are going to be making some big life choices with your most flexible years. When you look for jobs, when you are choosing where to live, at least don’t avoid the city…and, maybe, pursue it.
2) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Missional
Second, the church in Antioch was fundamentally missional. They were the prototypical ‘externally focused church.’ They embodied the idea that has emerged from Acts all year, that the Church is one of the few organizations that exists primarily for the benefit of those that don’t belong to it.
Rodney Stark (University of Washington sociologist) wrote a great book trying to answer the
question of how Christianity spread so dramatically in those first few hundred years. It is a scholarly work and when he started it he wasn’t a believer. He credits the study, in part with his reluctant and complicated conversion. But he says the unparalleled growth of the early church was largely due to “growth through social networks, through a structure of direct and interpersonal attachments. Most new religious movements fail because they quickly become closed, or semiclosed networks. That is, they fail to keep forming and sustaining attachments to outsiders and thereby lose the capacity to grow. Successful movements discover techniques for remaining open networks, able to reach out into new adjacent social networks.” In other words, Christianity exploded because, even though, as we have seen earlier in Acts, they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they never ghettoized. They continued to maintain connections to the people itn their city that they were called to love.
But, one of the really interesting things about this passage is that the church saw its missional call as having two distinct facets: i) Incarnational and ii) Proclamaitonal. Or in other words, they engaged their community and the surrounding communities in WORD and DEED.
i) Incarnational
Look with me in v 27-30. They take up a collection for a famine in Jerusalem.[8] They take an intentional and active interest in the physical and felt needs of suffering people. And, on top of this, they cross ethnic and tribal lines to do it. The Antioch church was probably composed mostly of Greeks and Roman, who did not flinch at the prospect of seneding help to the mostly Jewish community. This is almost unprecedented in the ancient world. And I kept thinking of this passage (where two prophets challenged the church to give) when two weeks ago, when Steph and Cassia stood up here and essentially said, ‘something horrible has happened, and Jesus’ people have to do something.’ That night you gave over $700 to help the Hatian people.[9]
ii) Proclamational
So the early church was serious about working hard and giving hard to help meet the estimable needs of their city. But they also believed that the story of Jesus and his victory over sin and death needed to be told. So they did something crazy.
Antioch may have had the best preaching lineup of all time[10]. Mark Driscoll likes to say, ‘Can you imagine going to church in Antioch at this time, when just one of your five preachers is the Apostle Paul.’[11] It would have been easy for them to just sit back and enjoy that.[12] Surely
some of the new Christians could be spared for the purpose of planting new churches without anyone noticing. Maybe it could even be social awkward ones that people didn’t get along with. But, instead, they set aside Paul and Barnabas. They hoard gifts but tasked their very best with the responsibility of starting up new Jesus communities. They were open to dramatic change if it meant that more people would have the chance to respond to Jesus.[13] They committed their A-team to ministry OUTSIDE the church.[14]
Throughout the history of the church, individual congregations have been tempted to elevate one of these over the others. Within a given church, it is tempting for those passionate about proclamation to get really annoyed by those who want to focus on incarnation…and the feelings are mutual. But a healthy congregation is passionate about both.
One last thought on this point: It is not incidental that this missional congregation is also a congregation described as one committed to worship[15], prayer[16], fasting[17] and deeply in tune with the Holy Spirit[18]. True worship is never simply inward or therapeutic…it should always lead to an outward, missional focus. Worship is dangerous.[19] The presence of God can produce marching orders.[20]
3) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Diverse
Finally, the new center of the early church was the most diverse, cosmopolitan city in the Roman empire…and I am convinced that this is not an incidental detail on why it became one of the most effective congregations in Church history. Antioch was a global city, and its inhabitants included large African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Western populations. In addition there is historical evidence of significant Persian, Indian, and Chinese neighborhoods in Antioch. The city was so diverse that it was split into at least 18 walled ethnic quarters (ghettos). Selucis who built Antioch, didn’t just build walls around the city, but large walls to separate the ethnic groups from each other.
Keller again, “American Christians are the most anti-urban Christians in the world and as a
result American cities are the most underserved by Christians. (It would take) 10% of evangelical Christians in this country to move into cities to live proportionally…Jew(ish people) for example, gay people for example, Asian people, Black and Hispanic people all live disproportionately in cities, and as a result the have a lot more cultural power, and they deserve it, because there they are …until evangelicals are willing to live in the city they can stop bellyaching about what’s going wrong with the culture.”Cities are not more important but they are more strategic. If we were going to be underrepresented somewhere, it should be anywhere but our nation and world’s urban centers. It is the one place early church was overrepresented. This may be a particularly tough message for some of you, because, many of you could have gone to Berkeley or UCLA but chose Davis because of precisely how urban it wasn’t. You may hate the city. But you are going to have to get use to urban life sooner or later, because after the final day, when God establishes his kingdom and remakes the world, he describes the new realm of his eternal reign a great city. Eternity is going to be urban. You don’t read in the scriptures about a great escatalogical suburb coming down from heaven.
So what about us now? We are aggies? We go to a school that has, no kidding, over 100 cows (including this one) on campus[7] and a road called dairy drive. Well, in two weeks, I am going to argue from Acts 17, that the only thing in the same strategic ballpark as the city is the University. That is why Amanda and I are spending a season here. And you should make the most of your few years of influence in one of our world’s great academic institutions. But what I want you to get from this observation is: ‘Don’t run from the city.’ In the next 1 to 4 years you are going to be making some big life choices with your most flexible years. When you look for jobs, when you are choosing where to live, at least don’t avoid the city…and, maybe, pursue it.
2) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Missional
Second, the church in Antioch was fundamentally missional. They were the prototypical ‘externally focused church.’ They embodied the idea that has emerged from Acts all year, that the Church is one of the few organizations that exists primarily for the benefit of those that don’t belong to it.
Rodney Stark (University of Washington sociologist) wrote a great book trying to answer the
question of how Christianity spread so dramatically in those first few hundred years. It is a scholarly work and when he started it he wasn’t a believer. He credits the study, in part with his reluctant and complicated conversion. But he says the unparalleled growth of the early church was largely due to “growth through social networks, through a structure of direct and interpersonal attachments. Most new religious movements fail because they quickly become closed, or semiclosed networks. That is, they fail to keep forming and sustaining attachments to outsiders and thereby lose the capacity to grow. Successful movements discover techniques for remaining open networks, able to reach out into new adjacent social networks.” In other words, Christianity exploded because, even though, as we have seen earlier in Acts, they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they never ghettoized. They continued to maintain connections to the people itn their city that they were called to love.But, one of the really interesting things about this passage is that the church saw its missional call as having two distinct facets: i) Incarnational and ii) Proclamaitonal. Or in other words, they engaged their community and the surrounding communities in WORD and DEED.
i) Incarnational
Look with me in v 27-30. They take up a collection for a famine in Jerusalem.[8] They take an intentional and active interest in the physical and felt needs of suffering people. And, on top of this, they cross ethnic and tribal lines to do it. The Antioch church was probably composed mostly of Greeks and Roman, who did not flinch at the prospect of seneding help to the mostly Jewish community. This is almost unprecedented in the ancient world. And I kept thinking of this passage (where two prophets challenged the church to give) when two weeks ago, when Steph and Cassia stood up here and essentially said, ‘something horrible has happened, and Jesus’ people have to do something.’ That night you gave over $700 to help the Hatian people.[9]
ii) Proclamational
So the early church was serious about working hard and giving hard to help meet the estimable needs of their city. But they also believed that the story of Jesus and his victory over sin and death needed to be told. So they did something crazy.
Antioch may have had the best preaching lineup of all time[10]. Mark Driscoll likes to say, ‘Can you imagine going to church in Antioch at this time, when just one of your five preachers is the Apostle Paul.’[11] It would have been easy for them to just sit back and enjoy that.[12] Surely
some of the new Christians could be spared for the purpose of planting new churches without anyone noticing. Maybe it could even be social awkward ones that people didn’t get along with. But, instead, they set aside Paul and Barnabas. They hoard gifts but tasked their very best with the responsibility of starting up new Jesus communities. They were open to dramatic change if it meant that more people would have the chance to respond to Jesus.[13] They committed their A-team to ministry OUTSIDE the church.[14]Throughout the history of the church, individual congregations have been tempted to elevate one of these over the others. Within a given church, it is tempting for those passionate about proclamation to get really annoyed by those who want to focus on incarnation…and the feelings are mutual. But a healthy congregation is passionate about both.
One last thought on this point: It is not incidental that this missional congregation is also a congregation described as one committed to worship[15], prayer[16], fasting[17] and deeply in tune with the Holy Spirit[18]. True worship is never simply inward or therapeutic…it should always lead to an outward, missional focus. Worship is dangerous.[19] The presence of God can produce marching orders.[20]
3) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Diverse
Finally, the new center of the early church was the most diverse, cosmopolitan city in the Roman empire…and I am convinced that this is not an incidental detail on why it became one of the most effective congregations in Church history. Antioch was a global city, and its inhabitants included large African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Western populations. In addition there is historical evidence of significant Persian, Indian, and Chinese neighborhoods in Antioch. The city was so diverse that it was split into at least 18 walled ethnic quarters (ghettos). Selucis who built Antioch, didn’t just build walls around the city, but large walls to separate the ethnic groups from each other.
But the church in Antioch appeared to be a reflection of the diversity of the city from the start. We see that from the description of the leadership team. The leadership team included a Jewish Pharisee, a black dude, a Roman, a Levite who was ethnically Greek, and a Greek prince of the Roman Empire.
Stott: “These five men, therefore, symbolized the ethnic and cultural diversity of Antioch.” The represented 3 continents and 4 different ethnic groups.
And this is why were they called ‘Christians’ first in Antioch. The name was made up because the Jesus followers were ‘wall crossers.’ They transcended the categories of their day. And those who tried to describe the movement realized that they needed to invent a new category for a religion that was not based on a national aleigence.[21] One of the defining characteristics of the early church was its ethic diversity…its ability to embrace the contributions of people from hugely diverse backgrounds and transcend the bitterest social divisions their culture maintained.[22]
Let me wrap us by trying to illustrate this point with a story. After I graduated from Grad School (the first time) I got a job in Buffalo, NY. We got a place downtown (because we believe that Christians should live in the city whenever possible). A few days after we moved in we went to the DMV to get our New York licenses. It was fifteen blocks or so away. But it might have been 15 of the most influential blocks of my life. When we arrived at the DMV I realized that I had not seen a single white person since we had left our apartment. I remember thinking, this thing (where the white people live and go to church in the suburbs and the African Americans and Latinos live and go to church in the city) is broken. This can’t be God’s best for his diverse creation. The Church should transcend even the most deeply felt cultural divisions. So we decided to put ourselves in the place of cultural learners and cross the Sunday morning color line. We found a remarkable little church on the edge of the east side, pastored by Emory Brown, (a man we retain a huge amount of affection for). The church was mostly black, but the elders were composed of two black men, Emory and the worship leader, a white guy who led the children’s church, a gentleman of mixed Black/Italian ethnicity and a Korean PhD student. This was the modern equivalent of the Antioch 5.
But what we didn’t know was that the reason people don’t often choose to transcend cultural divisions together isn’t because it doesn’t occur to them, it’s because it turns out to be really hard. We joined the church and asked the elders to put us to work. We were assigned to the youth ministry under the leadership of Calvin and Darlene Fitzgerald. We later found out that Calvin had only been out of prison for a couple years where he had been part of the Nation of Islam and various black power groups and Darlene had only been clean for a couple years…and was HIV positive. They did not try to hide their brokenness, but they connected with urban youth effortlessly.
They didn’t like us much from the start and I can’t say we warmed up to them. Calvin’s idea of a useful youth volunteer was someone who would pick up kids from the most dangerous neighborhoods and who could preach without notice. The meeting would get to the point where it seemed appropriate for some teaching and he would read a random passage and tell me to get up and teach on it. Now those of you who know me know that I think it is deplorable that anyone would presume to teach the contents of God’s holy self revelation without a lot of preparation. I had my first outline of this talk completed 11 months ago. So Calvin and I began to butt heads…regularly. I arrogantly felt like he wasn’t deep enough into the scriptures to have anything to say. He felt like I was too culturally removed from the students to have anything to say. He went to the elders to ask to have us reassigned. The elders refused, and told him to learn how to use us. Let’s just say, things were not going well…until the day of what I will call the ‘rib incident.’
One day Calvin called me up and asked me to meet him for dinner. We sat down at Casa de Pizza and he said, ‘Let me order.’ He ordered something like 45 barbecue ribs and then turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know what kinds of leafy green stuff white people eat, but we’ll do that next time.’ What I didn’t know was that that huge bowl of sparsely meated cow bones was a peace offering. We talked for a long time. He told me that about his black power background and even confessed ‘until very recently I hated all white people.’ I confessed that I was culturally adrift in the youth ministry, that I was having trouble connecting with the kids and had a lot to learn about urban life…but that I could be taught if he took the time to mentor me. And things were never the same. A couple months later when his kid ended up sick and in the hospital we visited them, not because it was the right thing to do, but because we had deep and genuine affection for them. A couple after that, Calvin had to pass an algebra exam (he was going back to school to become a caterer and chef) and asked me to tooter him. He started to utilize Amanda and I as part of his team and we learned things about urban youth ministry, the ghetto and the kids from them that we would have never picked up on our own. We took the ministry over a year later when Calvin and Darlene moved on, but simply would not have been able to without his mentoring. If God had not made us look at this Jesus follower who could not have been more different than us and recognize ‘he has stuff to teach us’…or if they had been written us off as unusable and been unwilling to teach us…the ministry would have not been nearly as helpful to those students who were struggling to live for Jesus in some of the nations toughest schools and would have ended when they left. This relationship could have been undone by my pride or his bitterness. It could have been undone by his pride or my bitterness. But Jesus heals that crap, and my making us both willing to learn, he built a better team to reach these kids.
In the book of Acts God makes it pretty clear that the collection of his people that would come to be called the Church, was not to be like the world. It was to be more not less diverse. It would transcend the cultural divisions of the surrounding society…but it would not necessarily be easy. It would require humility. But the church is God’s fullest expression of his kingdom when it, not only transcends the divisions that plague the surrounding culture, but embraces all his passions and has grace for each of their champions.______________
[1] Same words as 8:4 – suggesting that the interveining material (of the mission in Samaria and the events with Cornelius) were preparing the church to deal with a full scale multi-cultural explosion
[2] ‘But the scale of Gentile evangelization in Antioch was something entirely new.’ FF Bruce
[3] There are rich implications of even this minor insight. First, the world wide, 2000 year and running, multi-billion member Christian movement can be traced back to two people who just decide to try something crazy. Second, Christianity is not and has never been meant to be a centralized, authoritative thing. It crumbles and dies in that form. It is a grass roots movement with the Holy Spirit organically using whoever is available. However, there is leadership and followership, even in the early church as these teachers submitted to Barnabas when he showed up to do an orthodoxy/orthopraxy check.
[4] There were a million people in Rome and the others not far behind – in 1850 only 4 cities over a million – we are just catching up with the urbanization of the Roman empire. (Keller)
[5] This came from Keller, but, then again, so did most of this point. I will try to city frequently, but so much of my thought on this topic has come from Keller that you should probobly just consider this whole point inextricably indebted to him.
[6] - James Davidson Hunter
[7] And the facilities to accomidate for 650.
[8] Boyce: “As far as I know, this is the first charitable act of this nature in all recorded history – on race of people collecting money to help another people. No wonder they were called Christians first at Antioch.”
[9] We also know, that 150 years later, they church was still incarnationally missional. Bishop Fabious wrote that in 251, the church in Antioch had grown to 30,000 people and was financially supporting ‘more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons.’ (Stark)
[10] Notice, that all accounts and instructions about early church leadership describe a teaching/leading team. The verse says ‘teachers and prophets’ Again, Boyce: “We have fallen away from thaty principle in our time through a pattern of organization in which churches usually are in the hands of just one minister.” Also see my discussion of this wrt the earliest non-canonical documents of the church under point 4 of this post
[11] This is a paraphrase from memory. It is probably not an exact rendering.
[12] Wright: “To be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.”
[13] ‘Missionary activity was not an addendum to a faith that was basically ‘about’ something else…’Christianity was never more itself than in the launching of the world mission’…The story of Acts is the story…of early Christian mission…World missions is thus the first and most obvious feature of early Christian Praxis.’ NT Wright – ‘The New Testament and the People of God’ 360-1 – Dan and I read this book together and his comment on this passage was ‘Missions is not an optional program of the church. You can be ‘kind of not into’ Men’s Ministry or Women’s ministry. But we all have to be into mission.'
[14] “We know that Judea did in fact suffer severely from a famine at some point between AD 45 and 48.” Bruce
[15] NT Wright: “We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular (corporate) devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction.”
[16] Piper “It is almost impossible to overstate the historical importance of what happened here…in this prayer meeting.”
[17] Stott: “In neither reference to fasting does it occur alone. It is linked with worship in verse 2 and with prayer in verse 3. For seldom if ever is fasting an end in itself. It is the negative action (abstenention from food and other distractions) for the sake of the positive one (worshiping and praying).”
[18] Side note: The Early Fathers leaned heavily on this passage and others like it to establish the divinity of the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. He is commanding and obeyed as God. Boyce puts it really well, I think: ‘rather than thinking of the Holy Spirit (as) a power that we are somehow wo seize and use, we are to think of him as a person whose job it is to use us.”
[19] ‘We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction…to be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.” Wright p3
[20] Dan has declared this ‘the year of the Spirit’ and rightly so, because
Many of us probably feel a little squeamish about a focus on the spirit, because we have encountered what we might consider an undue emphasis on his work. But a true emphasis on the Holy Spirit should not lead to navel gazing or the pursuit of signs, but on obedience in serving and sharing with those outside the church.
[21] The wall crossers thing is from Keller.
[22] I recognized that come CL’s have made an intentional choice to help diversify our community just by being part of it. Some of you could have chosen ethnic based Christian fellowships. The choice would have been understandable. But I am personally grateful for each person who takes a risk on our not-so-divers community, bringing the correction and insight (and a portion of the image of God) from an underrepresented background.
[2] ‘But the scale of Gentile evangelization in Antioch was something entirely new.’ FF Bruce
[3] There are rich implications of even this minor insight. First, the world wide, 2000 year and running, multi-billion member Christian movement can be traced back to two people who just decide to try something crazy. Second, Christianity is not and has never been meant to be a centralized, authoritative thing. It crumbles and dies in that form. It is a grass roots movement with the Holy Spirit organically using whoever is available. However, there is leadership and followership, even in the early church as these teachers submitted to Barnabas when he showed up to do an orthodoxy/orthopraxy check.
[4] There were a million people in Rome and the others not far behind – in 1850 only 4 cities over a million – we are just catching up with the urbanization of the Roman empire. (Keller)
[5] This came from Keller, but, then again, so did most of this point. I will try to city frequently, but so much of my thought on this topic has come from Keller that you should probobly just consider this whole point inextricably indebted to him.
[6] - James Davidson Hunter
[7] And the facilities to accomidate for 650.
[8] Boyce: “As far as I know, this is the first charitable act of this nature in all recorded history – on race of people collecting money to help another people. No wonder they were called Christians first at Antioch.”
[9] We also know, that 150 years later, they church was still incarnationally missional. Bishop Fabious wrote that in 251, the church in Antioch had grown to 30,000 people and was financially supporting ‘more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons.’ (Stark)
[10] Notice, that all accounts and instructions about early church leadership describe a teaching/leading team. The verse says ‘teachers and prophets’ Again, Boyce: “We have fallen away from thaty principle in our time through a pattern of organization in which churches usually are in the hands of just one minister.” Also see my discussion of this wrt the earliest non-canonical documents of the church under point 4 of this post
[11] This is a paraphrase from memory. It is probably not an exact rendering.
[12] Wright: “To be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.”
[13] ‘Missionary activity was not an addendum to a faith that was basically ‘about’ something else…’Christianity was never more itself than in the launching of the world mission’…The story of Acts is the story…of early Christian mission…World missions is thus the first and most obvious feature of early Christian Praxis.’ NT Wright – ‘The New Testament and the People of God’ 360-1 – Dan and I read this book together and his comment on this passage was ‘Missions is not an optional program of the church. You can be ‘kind of not into’ Men’s Ministry or Women’s ministry. But we all have to be into mission.'
[14] “We know that Judea did in fact suffer severely from a famine at some point between AD 45 and 48.” Bruce
[15] NT Wright: “We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular (corporate) devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction.”
[16] Piper “It is almost impossible to overstate the historical importance of what happened here…in this prayer meeting.”
[17] Stott: “In neither reference to fasting does it occur alone. It is linked with worship in verse 2 and with prayer in verse 3. For seldom if ever is fasting an end in itself. It is the negative action (abstenention from food and other distractions) for the sake of the positive one (worshiping and praying).”
[18] Side note: The Early Fathers leaned heavily on this passage and others like it to establish the divinity of the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. He is commanding and obeyed as God. Boyce puts it really well, I think: ‘rather than thinking of the Holy Spirit (as) a power that we are somehow wo seize and use, we are to think of him as a person whose job it is to use us.”
[19] ‘We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction…to be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.” Wright p3
[20] Dan has declared this ‘the year of the Spirit’ and rightly so, because
Many of us probably feel a little squeamish about a focus on the spirit, because we have encountered what we might consider an undue emphasis on his work. But a true emphasis on the Holy Spirit should not lead to navel gazing or the pursuit of signs, but on obedience in serving and sharing with those outside the church.
[21] The wall crossers thing is from Keller.
[22] I recognized that come CL’s have made an intentional choice to help diversify our community just by being part of it. Some of you could have chosen ethnic based Christian fellowships. The choice would have been understandable. But I am personally grateful for each person who takes a risk on our not-so-divers community, bringing the correction and insight (and a portion of the image of God) from an underrepresented background.
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